Every CultureFlow read, from your Cultural Signature to a CONNECT briefing, comes from a graph of peer-reviewed cross-cultural research. This page is what is in it, how it becomes a briefing, and what we do not claim.
The joint file of the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, the two longest-running academic surveys of what people value, fielded in waves since 1981 with nationally representative samples. The 2017 to 2022 joint wave is our primary values source, extended with the WVS time series where a country was not in the latest wave. Values data covers 115 countries in the graph.
The International Social Survey Programme’s module on attitudes to work. It grounds how people at different levels of seniority relate to work, autonomy, and obligation.
The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness study of societal clusters and leadership expectations. We use it for regional context and as an independent check that our derived dimensions agree with established measures.
Kept in the graph as a source-tagged comparison layer, no longer the primary read. Where the values surveys and Hofstede disagree, the surveys win.
Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, held by CultureFlow under an exclusive commercial licence, and used as a validation anchor for the relational dimension of the Signature.
Peer-reviewed papers on cross-cultural communication, hiring, leadership, and negotiation, indexed so a briefing can draw on them and record which ones it used. Sources are tiered, and no dimension is presented as fact unless it is backed by at least two peer-reviewed sources and one institutional study with a published methodology.
Older data is weighted more cautiously. Two people are compared dimension by dimension, and a difference counts as friction only when it is large enough to matter, so small gaps are never dramatised. The five dimensions of the Cultural Signature are built from this layer. See how the engine works.
Lingnan University
Lead author of the individualism-collectivism index published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
University of Sussex
Cultural psychologist on identity and self-construal across cultures, co-author of the index.
Leuphana University
Vice-President of the World Values Survey Association.
Varna University of Management
Co-developer of the Minkov-Kaasa framework, the modern revision of national culture dimensions from World Values Survey data.
A cultural knowledge graph of 5,100+ entities connected by more than 395,000 relationships, covering 100+ countries.
Live graph count, October 2026.
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CultureFlow reads from a cultural knowledge graph built on the Integrated Values Surveys (the World Values Survey and European Values Study), the ISSP Work Orientations module, the GLOBE study, Hofstede’s dimensions as a comparison layer, the Akaliyski individualism-collectivism index, and a corpus of peer-reviewed cross-cultural research, covering 100+ countries.
Hofstede’s dimensions were derived from IBM employee surveys in the 1960s and 1970s and describe countries. CultureFlow’s dimensions are built from recent, nationally representative values surveys, and they describe a person: your Cultural Signature combines your country with your generation, gender, seniority, experience, and industry. Hofstede remains in our graph as a comparison layer.
Yes. The surveys are the most cited datasets in cross-cultural social science, the frameworks are published in peer-reviewed journals, and no dimension is presented as fact unless backed by at least two peer-reviewed sources.
Yes, and deliberately in one place. A language model writes each briefing, but the graph decides what is true: the model is given the two Signatures, the relationships between them, and the research, and it records which sources it used. Research-backed, not AI guesswork.
Dr Plamen Akaliyski, Professor Vivian Vignoles, Professor Christian Welzel, and Professor Michael Minkov.